“Our U.S. culture values ‘can-do’ individualism, but we forget how much depends on being lucky enough to be born in the right place.”

Ming Ming Chiu, professor of learning and instruction, Graduate School of Education

University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A University at Buffalo education
professor has sided with the environment in the timeless
“nurture vs. nature” debate after his research found
that a child’s ability to read depends mostly on where that
child is born, rather than on his or her individual qualities.

“Individual characteristics explain only 9 percent of the
differences in children who can read versus those who
cannot,” says Ming Ming Chiu, lead author of an international
study that explains this connection and a professor in the
Department of Learning and Instruction in UB’s Graduate
School of Education.

Therefore, he concludes, the country in which a child is born
largely determines whether he or she will have at least basic
reading skills. It’s clearly a case where
“nurture” — the environment and surroundings of
the child — is more important than “nature”
— the child’s inherited, individual qualities,
according to Chiu.

More than 99 percent of fourth-graders in the Netherlands can
read, but only 19 percent of fourth-graders in South Africa can
read, Chiu notes.

The study, “Ecological, Psychological and Cognitive
Components of Reading Difficulties: Testing the Component Model of
Reading in Fourth-graders Across 38 Countries,” analyzed
reading test scores of 186,725 fourth-graders from 38 countries,
including more than 4,000 children from the U.S. Chiu and
co-authors Catherine McBride-Chang of the Chinese University of
Hong Kong and Dan Lin of the Hong Kong Institute of Education
published the study in the winter 2013 issue of the Journal of
Learning Disabilities.

The educators used data from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development’s Program for International
Student Assessment.

Besides showing that the country of origin was a better
predictor of reading skills than individual traits, the study also
showed that other attributes at the child, school and country
levels were all related to reading.

First, girls were more likely than boys to have basic reading
skills, Chiu says. Children with greater early-literacy skills,
better attitudes about reading or greater self-confidence in their
reading ability also were more likely to have strong basic reading
skills.

“Children were more likely to have basic reading skills if
they were from privileged families, as measured through
socioeconomic status, number of books at home and parent attitudes
about reading,” says Chiu. “Also, children attending
schools with better school climate and more resources were more
likely to have basic reading skills.

“Our U.S. culture values ‘can-do’
individualism, but we forget how much depends on being lucky enough
to be born in the right place,” he says.

The Department of Ophthalmology has once again received an
unrestricted grant from Research to Prevent Blindness to continue
its laboratory-based and clinical research exploring vision
processes and disease.

NSF CAREER winner and associate professor of electrical
engineering, Tommaso Melodia, is using ultrasound to create new
wireless sensors that can be used to treat diseases like diabetes
and heart disease in real time.

Led by Shermali Gunawardena, new research into how the
brain functions has revealed some of the potential causes while
opening up potential new routes to future prevention of disorders
like Alzheimers Disease.